Remove the front license plate to drive it hard. Install rotor cooling rings for track days and then remove them to prevent corrosion but suffer brake fade anyway. Now this. Combined with the on again, off again nav display and peeling hood emblem I hope this was an early production car.

I feel weird in typing this but... I hope it's becasue there's a problem with the car. I'm not a Corvette guy but the C7 appears to be one hell of a sports car for the dollar and I'd be very disappointed if this were "normal" for the car. True, world class sports cars should be hot and cold weather tested adequately to ensure that they hold up. And a sports car, like this, should be expected to handle these conditions with no sweat (no pun intended).

This isn't normal because this should be something that is caught in the battery of tests. 2nd gear WOT runs at low speeds does mean less air to the rad, but the fact that this is happening when you're hitting sweepers is rather odd. You guys checked coolant level, yes, but I have to wonder if there are still trapped air pockets in the engine that are difficult to get out (i.e. cylinder head or heater core circuit). What about rad fans, rad cap, thermostat, water pump?

This can't be right. In an age of Death Valley car testing, no modern car should overheat under these conditions. I'd be talking to the Corvette engineers about this (well, I wouldn't, but Edmunds must have some contacts in the right places).

@jeepsrt said:
Not at all, whenever I go out for a fun drive I never use the A/C in our M3 or Corvette. It rob's the power and takes a lot of the fun out of it, especially at altitude.

Bah, with an engine this powerful the loss of HP from AC is nominal.

In a modern sports car there is simply no excuse for overheating like this. I expect that my new state of the art $60k sports car to charge canyons all day without overheating. Running past normal, fine, but pegging the temp gauge and setting off the dash warning? That is an inexcusable failure.

@bankerdanny said:
In a modern sports car there is simply no excuse for overheating like this. I expect that my new state of the art $60k sports car to charge canyons all day without overheating. Running past normal, fine, but pegging the temp gauge and setting off the dash warning? That is an inexcusable failure.

I don't recall overheating being a chronic issue on the Corvette since the C5 at least. I have never had one of my BMWs or my Mazdaspeed 3 overheat on the track- never mind on the road. One reason I recently passed on a nice CPO 370Z Sport was the fact that I would have to add an oil cooler in order to track it- otherwise it goes into "limp mode".

@quickster7 said:
Another quality issues with a GM product. If you were driving a Nissan GTR would it overheat like the Corvette (cheap 7)

Let's see 1st year C7 - overheats and requires a little cool down time before driving hard again vs.
1st year GTR - Grenades it's transmission when using the launch control feature built into the car, a problem so extensive it eventually led to a class action lawsuit.

I think there's something wrong with this example. Bad thermostat, air in the system, electric fans not turning on correctly, something. I had overheating in my '83 GTI, turned out to be excess flashing on a casting obstructing coolant flow. Remove the flashing, problem solved. While it should have been caught during manufacturing, it wasn't an inherent GTI defect.

When I would take my C5 Z06 for spirited trips up and down a local twisty mountain road(2nd & 3rd gear high revs), I never had any issues with the coolant temp pegging the gauge on me. Ambient temps were in the 80s and I wasn't running A/C. On my fourth trip up and down the engine oil temp exceeded 240°F and I decided to back off a bit but never got any complaints from the car about it. Coolant temp never went north of 230°F (for reference the cooling fans wouldn't even kick on until 225°F, normal running temp was 190°F).

Everyone is saying it's inexcusable - they're right; it is. But what's really inexcusable is this happened to you people BEFORE and you did nothing about it. WTF?

It was 93 degrees on the mountain? Big deal - this probably had almost nothing to do with how hot it was out. You have actual automotive engineers on your staff - please tell me one of them is able to figure out this is due to a malfunction.

The fact that "the guys" there gave you flack about not whipping out your iPhone 5S and getting a shot of the IP warning (which can be confirmed simply by pulling the OBD codes), but nobody gave your fleet manager any flack about not flagging this obvious malfunction and having it analyzed when it first happened is not encouraging.

Unfortunately American cars are engineered for American driving habits - when I was a yound USAF troop in 1980s Europe, guys who brought Corvettes over to run the Autobahn, many found them spewing steam like a tea kettle, while VW Rabbits ran 90+mph all day.

The editors are car guys and girls but really don't know much about the oily bits. There has to be some type of malfunction causing it to overheat. He never said he got out and looked under the hood to see how much coolant was in the tank or see if the cooling fan was running at high speed. He didn't say that he checked to make sure road debris was blocking the grill.